Image Rescue
This shot suffers from the classic landscape situation of bright sky and dark land below
We have a well-exposed sky here, but because a filter hasn’t been used, the result is an underexposed area of land. However, the highlights have been preserved, so it’s possible to rescue it. We need to lighten the land and darken the sky slightly, so that everything balances.
In Lightroom or Camera Raw, we’ll run a Graduated Filter from the base of the image up to just above the distant land 1 , then carefully lift the shadows with both the Shadows and Exposure sliders. Let the Shadows slider do most of the work with +60, but a more subtle +0.50 on Exposure will help, too.
Now repeat the process with the Graduated Filter, but bring it down from the top of the sky to the sea 2 . This time, we’ll bring the Exposure slider back to -40 and add +20 to the Contrast slider. We can now go to the Curve Panel, select the Point Curve and create a gentle S-curve to increase contrast globally 3 . Make sure not to darken the land again too much, though.
Finally, we can warm it up 4 using the Temperature slider in the Basic Panel, and boost Vibrance by +20. Zooming in, we’ve managed to pull out plenty of detail from the shadows without causing any issues with image degradation.